Vanderdecken's tonnage cheater.
Slowly at first, but steadily, yachts became longer, narrower, and deeper; the crack yacht of one year being displaced the next by something with more length, less beam, and more ballast. Here and there, it is true, an occasional vessel of exceptional excellence held her own for a year or two with the newer ones; but what looked for a little like high water was but the mark of an exceptional wave which in its turn was covered, and the true flood seen to be a bit away yet.
To check the growing tendency towards length and depth at the expense of beam, the New Thames Yacht Club, at a meeting on March 12, 1874, adopted the following rule:—
The length shall be the distance from the fore part of the main stem to the after part of the main sternpost measured in a straight line along the deck.
The breadth shall be the distance between the outsides of the outside planks or wales, measured where that distance is largest.
The depth shall be the distance between the top of the covering board and the bottom of the keel at the middle point of the length.
The product of the length, the breadth, and the depth, divided by 200, shall be taken as the tonnage of the yacht.
But the influence of this rule was not far-reaching, and confined to the New Thames Club, and (in a slightly modified form) to the Queenstown Model Yacht Club; few yachts were built under it, and these were not conspicuously successful. Nor was the reason of this very far to seek. The tax on depth induced builders to cut down freeboard, and, so far as might be, draft, while to make up for this latter deficiency the amidships draft was carried well forward and aft, and only little rake given to the post, with the result that the few boats built under this rule carried an extremely awkward sail-plan, and were abnormally slow in stays.
The great general effect of the 94, or Thames Rule, has been described; but among its minor influences may be mentioned the inducement to have the utmost water-line length on a given deck or measurement length. One obvious manner of attaining this was by keeping the sternpost upright or nearly so; while the writer, in a little cutter called the 'Peg Woffington,' built for himself in 1871, took a farther advantage of the rule by putting a ram bow on her, thus getting the water-line even longer than the measurement on deck. An additional interest attaches to this yacht as being the earliest sailing yacht, so far as I have been able to ascertain, which had all her ballast outside.